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Peter Lucas: Duckboat investor could end up sinking Baker's hopes

By Peter Lucas

Updated:
02/14/2014 03:17:21 PM EST

What's a guy got to do to become governor around here?

Four years ago Republican Charlie Baker had to watch then-state Treasurer Tim Cahill, an independent, run interference for Gov. Deval Patrick and help the Democratic governor win re-election in a three way race.

For Baker it was like the hit the Broncos' Wes Welker put on Patriots cornerback Aqib Talib that knocked Talib out of the AFC championship game.

Baker had a good shot at defeating a struggling Patrick, but Cahill skewed the issue and Patrick prevailed. But Baker did not whine about it, like Bill Belichick.

Patrick is not running for re-election in 2014, so the governor's office is wide open. But Baker, who is expected to easily win the party endorsement for the job, could again be running in a three-candidate field in November.

The same play is being set up again. Only this time the Cahill/Welker takeout role is being played by businessman Jeffrey McCormack, a Mitt Romney lookalike, who is running for governor as -- you guessed it -- an independent.

But while McCormack, 53, joins Evan Falchuck, a health- care executive who is also running as an independent, the fact McCormack is already willing to spend $1 million of his own money to seek the job, makes him a threat to Baker in the November election.

McCormack is a venture capitalist who runs Saturn Partners. He started Boston's Duck Tours 20 years ago.

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He sounds like your typical GOP gubernatorial candidate in that he is for lower taxes, smaller government and against government waste and partisan politics. He sounds, in fact, a lot like Charlie Baker.

Unlike Baker, however, who served in two state Cabinet positions, McCormack has no political experience and has never served in state government. He is a former Republican who voted for Deval Patrick.

That lack of political experience was prominently displayed when Jim Braude of Boston Public Radio asked McCormack, a Boston resident, to name his local state representative and state senator in whose elections he presumably voted.

McCormack could not do so, which led Braude and others to ponder why people with no political experience believe they can suddenly start at the top rung in government without first serving an apprenticeship, as they would in the business world. Even Mitt Romney ran for the U.S. Senate before he ran for governor.

The answer might be found in the legacy of Deval Patrick, a man who came into Massachusetts politics from nowhere, with no state government, legislative or political experience, to win the governorship in 2006 and get re-elected in 2010.

Patrick was a unique case, however. He was a charismatic speaker who could move a crowd. He had a well thought-out narrative. And he was African-American, seeking to become the first black governor in Massachusetts.

The downside to the inexperienced outsider taking over state government, as in Patrick's case, is that by the time he finds out how to do the job -- like how to work with the Legislature, or how to oversee the bureaucracy, for instance -- the damage has been done.

Patrick's notorious lack of interest in the workings of state government were obvious from his first days on the job when he acted as though all he had to do was give orders and things would get done.

It was this type of attitude that led to the lack of leadership, supervision and accountability in the various state departments that have been allowed to run amok.

These include horrific -- and mounting -- stories out of the Department of Children and Families, which seems to have been run by incompetent and sadistic monsters. This underfunded agency, which allowed a 5-year-old Fitchburg boy under its watch to simply vanish, also has a policy of placing at-risk children in foster homes with live-in criminals.

Patrick's legacy also includes the lack of administrative safeguards that allowed a rogue drug-lab chemist to falsify drugs tests that has led to the release of hundreds of people convicted of drug crimes; a runaway welfare agency that throws EBT cards around like confetti; Evergreen Solar; a shocking increase in homeless families; the imminent and alarming nursing-home crisis; the drug compounding scandal in Framingham, and so on.

But don't get me started.

As the Patrick administration has made clear, the state needs to elect a governor who knows what he is doing and not another inexperienced grandstanding novice.

It's just swell that Patrick had a lot of "fun" while being governor. It is too bad those poor, abandoned and wretched children under state supervision on his watch did not.

Peter Lucas' political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.

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